Difference Between Hits, Visits and Unique Visits

Many people get confused while looking at the web stats of any website. It’s always better to have an idea of web stats, including Hits, Visitors and Unique visitors. So, today I’d like to share a few thoughts of mine about the difference between the 3 metrics – Hits Vs Visitors Vs Unique Visitors.

Difference Between Hits, Visits Unique Visits

Hits: A hit is a simple statistic which tells you that one of your webpage has been visited/loaded. The HIT metric is obviously inaccurate as a measure of actual visitors that landed on your site because one single visitor might visit 10 different web pages of yours in the same/single browsing session. In general, we can call them as ‘page views’.

Verdict: This HIT metric can be altered and so doesn’t have any importance while analyzing a website.

Visitors: Even though more helpful than Hits, your website’s number of visitors data will contain the duplicate/redundant numbers which is taken from the overall hit count. The “Visitor” metric tell you how many times a website has been visited within a given period of time. The main difference between Hits & Visitors is that hits metric count each inner page visits, back button clicks & page refreshes while the Visitors metric only count the visiting session to your site once.

Verdict: As the visitor metric counts the same visitors (including you) over & over again, it has medium influence in the analysis of a website.

Unique Visitors: Due to the advanced tracking capabilities, this “Unique visitors” metric is considered as the most trusted & dependable web stat. This metric takes the unique visitor identifiers such as the visitor’s IP address into account in order to determine whether it is the first time visit or a return visit within a given period of time.

Verdict: Due to its advanced tracking capability, the “Unique visitors” is the perfect metric that can be taken into account while analyzing the web stats of any website.

Example Web Stats:

5,000 Hits – Each time a webpage is viewed/refreshed.

1500 Visitors – How many times the site was visited during the day? This could include the same individual visitor (including you) coming back later in the same day to your site.

1200 Unique Visitors – How many different or unique visitors stopped by/landed on your site during a particular day.

Hope these examples will give you an overview of web stats & the difference between Hits, Visitors and Unique Visitors.